Joie De Vivre
by amazuppai
Summary: By the time they get the distress beacon, Shiro is already gone.


**A/N** : Because who doesn't love a good poisoning and confusing dream adventures?

* * *

"We shouldn't have let him go down alone," Pidge mutters, not for the first time, anxiously tapping her fingers around their grip on the Lion's controls. "There should have been at least one of us with him, we should have checked the place more thoroughly, we should have-"

"Pidge." Lance's voice is firm, placating. She stops, taking a deep breath. "We checked all we could. Coran and Allura are _still_ checking. Maybe Shiro shouldn't have gone on his own, but this was only supposed to be routine." There's a long pause, none of them saying anything before Lance tries again to remedy the atmosphere. "Maybe he's fine. Maybe he just ran into a spot of trouble with the Lion, maybe his communication's just out of order."

"Or maybe there's some sort of secret alien cult down there, or some kind of poisonous plant or toxin, or the Galra have learned how to shield themselves from the castle's sens-"

" _Hunk_. Not helping."

"I'm sorry," he breathes, "I just. I'm worried. The transmission he sent, it didn't sound good."

Lance remembers it clearly, the way Shiro's voice had come rough and heavy through the speakers from the planet below, requesting backup with no explanation as to why. From what they'd gathered in the brief contact Shiro had with them, he wasn't in a good way, panicked and seemingly a little delirious, and it was as much a red flag as his need to contact them was in the first place.

"We're coming up on visual," Keith says suddenly, interrupting Lance's reverie, and they all snap to attention as they spot the Black Lion, bringing theirs in to land beside it. At first there is no sign of Shiro, the Lion still standing with its head bowed and mouth open for him, but as they step down from their own Lions Hunk finally spots him, muttering a curse and directing their gaze to the slumped form of Shiro lying on the floor of the Lion's mouth.

Keith is the first to reach him, crouching beside him and checking him over, and they all catch his sharp intake of breath as he comes to Shiro's stomach. "He's been stabbed," he grits through his teeth, his glove stained dark when he pulls his hand back, then a moment later he mutters, "Poison."

"What?" Lance breathes, but it is obvious in Shiro's face, the pallor and the fever and the blood all over his hands. They have never encountered something like this before, and none of them are quite sure what to do.

When Pidge finally speaks, her voice trembles a little, wide-eyed and scared of what this means. "We need to get him back to the castle."

* * *

They never speak, blank masks where he desperately wishes to see a human face again, painted eyes reflecting nothing from his gaze as they work around him. His arm still burns, fever raging thick in his skull and his own screams ringing in his ears, smouldering in his throat. The arena has taken so much from him, and it only continues to now, taking and taking and giving him nothing but pain and heartache and the dry taste of sweat on his tongue and blood in his throat.

He barely feels it when they attach the metal to the stump his arm used to be, but he definitely feels it when they attach it to his mind, whatever strange magic they use shooting through his veins and igniting his nerves, his whole body sharp with pain like static and _burning, burning, burning_ until there is nothing left but the slate-grey ceiling and paraesthesia in his limbs and days of missing time. "You're doing your best, son," Doctor Holt says, smile warm and wide but the light hitting his face wrong, reflecting off his glasses so Shiro can't see his eyes.

He rests his hand on the table beside Shiro's replacement, and what he wouldn't give to be able to reach out, to feel a human touch again, but for some reason he can't bring himself to do it. "My best isn't good enough," he rasps to the empty room, and then the druids return.

* * *

"Are you sure this'll work?" Lance asks, voicing their concerns as they stand gathered around the chamber in the infirmary that Shiro now rests inside. They had brought him here the moment they returned to the castle, the tension that has been building throughout the flight back and the dash up from the hangars now sitting stagnant over them.

"It healed you just fine," Keith mutters back, but he doesn't sound entirely convinced of it himself.

"Something's not right," Coran mumbles, and they all stiffen, sharp eyes turned on him. He pauses in his perusal of whatever is on his handheld device, glancing up at them. "Oh, it's nothing serious," he passes off, "Don't worry. Something just seems to be wrong with the readout."

"Which means what, exactly?" Hunk asks, leaning over his shoulder to get a closer look, as though he'd be able to understand it at a glance.

Coran waves a dismissive hand, fiddling with the device. "It just means we don't have a clear idea of when he'll wake up. In his condition I'd probably guess a couple of days, but we can't know for sure until I get this working again."

They look back to the chamber, not sure what to make of the news. "Guess there's nothing for it," Lance sighs, hands in his pockets as he rocks back on his heels. They're sure it'll be a long wait.

* * *

"I hear you're shortlisted for Kerberos," Keith says casually, but his eyes are far too focused on his food, nudged about his plate with careful precision. "It's a good opportunity for you. Are you going to take it if they offer?"

"Most likely," Shiro replies, but something in him feels reluctant, hesitant to take what would otherwise be a no-brainer for him. "We rarely get missions that far out. I'd love to get the chance to fly that far, and it'd be a huge honour."

Keith is silent for a time, and there is something in his eyes that Shiro doesn't recognise, something that feels strange coming from that particular shade of blue. "You deserve it," he says finally, but for what, Shiro isn't sure, until Keith's eyes glance up at his hands, ungloved for the meal. He gets the feeling that the solid _thunk_ of his arm against the table has something to do with it, but he can't remember why.

* * *

"Have we been able to track down whoever did this yet?"

Allura turns at the voice, watching as he pauses just inside the doorway. "Keith," she murmurs, surprised to see him there, before turning back to what she was doing with the console. "No, not yet. If it was anything less than a small group of people our scanners won't be able to pick them up from here, but I'm not sending any more of you down there. I'm just getting the castle ready to leave orbit, actually."

She tries not to notice the expression he pulls, subtle in his face but still strong enough to betray how he feels about this whole situation. "But we need to know who's responsible," he presses, trying not to let it seep too heavily into his voice. "What if we run into them later somewhere else, and this happens again?"

She sighs, stepping down from the console and turning to meet him. "I know you're worried about him," she says, placing her hands gently on his shoulders, "But Shiro will be fine. Trust me." He doesn't say anything to that, his eyes averted as he thinks it over, and she offers him a smile. "Just give it some time. As for the threat of whoever did this, it seems to be a small enough group that we can't find them, and there's not a lot we can do regardless. We just have to make sure we don't send any of you out alone again. We'll debrief Shiro about it once he's woken up as well, to make sure we have the full story. Alright?"

Keith is silent for a moment, ruminating over it all, and then he sighs, finally meeting her gaze. "Alright," he says, and she smiles.

* * *

The castle has always felt empty, but never has it felt so eerily desolate. Despite its size, Shiro and his teammates have always seemed to be able to fill it, conversation rising in the chambers and the steady hum of daily activities following them through the halls, seven people and a handful of mice somehow filling a space built for thousands. Now, there is nothing; standing in the control room there is naught but the quiescent blue light of the console and the gentle buzz of power in the walls, but even that seems dimmed somehow, out of focus. Even when they first arrived here, crammed in the Blue Lion after their trip through the wormhole, it had never been so quiet - there had been the awe of a new world, the babbling interest of his friends at such a discovery. There is none of that now. He knows, even without looking, that he is alone here.

He looks anyway. He places his hands over the console first to ensure that no, it definitely doesn't work (though he is not sure he could pilot anything here regardless), and then he makes his way down to the infirmary, to the sleep chambers, unsure of what he expects to find and hoping he isn't disappointed when he discovers them all empty. They are, of course, sitting like knights around the centre of the room (they are all extended above ground, which is strange, he should know, but it doesn't click just yet) and glistening in the ambient light of the room. He steps up to one, wipes the condensation from the surface with his hand, catches his own reflection in it, and he stops. Something about it doesn't seem normal, doesn't seem right, but he can't quite figure out what, can't put his finger on what it is that bothers him about it.

He checks the hangars next, empty pods sitting in the darkness of the bay. It reminds him of the aviation museum back home, planes standing on podiums and hanging from the roof, spotlights pooling their surfaces, only these are not relics, as old as they are. They carry the ghosts of soldiers thousands of years gone, but they carry the hope of those in the present, too. Or, they did, before they all disappeared. He's not sure what to think of them now.

He does the full rounds of the castle, checking their quarters, the kitchens, the hologram room, the training deck, the silence sinking deeper and hollowing his bones with every room he checks. He hasn't felt silence like this since the trip to Kerberos, and even then there had been the Holts, the Garrison only a commlink away. There is nobody here; he has tried the radio in his helmet and the castle's PA system, and has received only static.

Eventually he finds himself in the Lion bays. The Black Lion is the only one still in its place, the others all standing as empty pads in the cavernous space around him. The Lion is the only thing he's found here that still feels alive, still gives him a sense of being; he places his palm on the flat metal of one of its feet, feels it thrum beneath his fingertips, and is at least glad for this. "Do you know where to find them?" he asks, and something rumbles deep in his chest. He smiles. "I thought so. Let's go get them."

* * *

They are all milling about one of the common rooms, occupying themselves as they wait for any news with laptops and old card games and trying to nap when Allura enters the room, carrying the stricken look and terse shoulders that immediately alerts them to the fact that something is wrong. "The Black Lion has gone," she tells them, voice oddly quiet in the silence that followed her entry.

The room is still for a long moment, until Hunk finally asks, "What?", and they burst into clamour.

"What do you mean, gone? As in the hangar's just suddenly empty?"

"Did someone steal it? Are we under attack?"

"How could they get in without us knowing? There's nowhere for a ship to dock unnoticed."

"It wasn't stolen," Allura cuts in, sinking into the seat beside Pidge. "It left."

Lance blinks at her, long and slow. "So, what, it just up and walked away? Can they do that?"

"Why not?" Pidge wonders, deep in thought over it. "We've seen the Lions display plenty of autonomous behaviour before. What's to say they can't pilot themselves?"

"Why would it do that, though?" Hunk asks, his game of Altean solitaire discarded on the floor for now. "Why now, of all times?"

"Shiro." They all stop when Keith finally speaks, looking to him in confusion. He takes a moment to figure out how to explain what he already knows in his mind. "He's probably got the strongest bond with his Lion out of all of us, and now that he's… Maybe it's still connecting with him."

Allura shakes her head, but slowly, not a total refute. "That's impossible," she muses, "The chambers put you into a total sleep. You can't dream, let alone psychically control a Lion. In any case, Coran is tracking the Lion and we've altered the castle's course to follow it, so we'll see where it leads us."

The Lion, as it turns out, doesn't seem to be leading them anywhere. They follow it for days, one step behind as it charts its way through space on a route that none of them can figure out, cutting a straight line between solar systems and galaxies, and Shiro sleeps through it all. None of them can quite figure out why he's taking so long to heal, why it won't give them an accurate estimate of when he'll wake up (this kind of poison, whatever it was they hit him with, is apparently something very difficult to heal), so all they can really do is sit and wait and wonder.

Which is exactly what Keith does. He sits in the infirmary, chin in his hand and deep in thought, and he waits, thinking over everything that has happened that brought them here and everything that could happen and everything they say will happen, everything his subconscious expects. His anxiety has been throwing possible outcomes back in his face for days, and while he knows rationally that they are incredibly unlikely, they still jar him regardless.

"I figured you'd be in here."

The voice brings him out of his reverie, looking up to be met with Pidge trouncing down the steps towards him with a gentle smile. He sighs as she sinks down to sit on the step beside him, offering a brief flick of his hand in passing greeting before returning his gaze elsewhere. "He's got to be doing something in there," he mutters, eyes narrowed at frosted covering of the chamber. "I just want to know what he's thinking."

"Shiro can be a bit of a mystery," she says, resting her chin in her hands. "Sometimes you just have to trust him and follow along and see where you end up."

"Even if it's the middle of dead space after several days of following empty signs?"

Pidge scoffs a brief laugh. "Sometimes even then. My dad once said that Shiro is the kind of person that doesn't attract misplaced trust, because he finds a place for everything. I wasn't sure what to make of that at the time."

"Weird," Keith replies, but he can't help feeling that it's true. A moment passes between them, the steady hum of the infirmary buzzing through the floor. "Did you know him?" he asks finally, "Before… Before Kerberos."

Pidge shakes her head, averting her eyes. "Not really. He came to our place for dinner once or twice before the mission, but I think I was too intimidated to really speak to him much back then."

"That's strange," he says, Pidge looking up at him in confusion. "We can barely get you to shut up around him these days."

She gives him a gentle punch in the shoulder, and they share a brief smile. "Seriously," she says, "He'll be fine. I'm not sure what this deal is with the Lion, but I'm sure it'll turn out okay. Give it time."

He glances back to the chamber, dew drops like stars across the surface, Shiro's resting face beneath. "Thanks," he breathes, and he means it. This kind of uncertainty always seems to throw him out.

" _Attention paladins_ ," Allura suddenly says over the comms, immediately catching their attention. They both jump to their feet, ready to jump into action for whatever this is. " _You are all needed on the bridge. We've found something_."

* * *

He doesn't remember ever feeling so nervous in his life. This mission is the biggest he's ever taken, one of the longest flights the Garrison sends, and he would be lying if he told himself he wasn't scared. The lead-up only makes it worse, every pat on the back and murmur of good luck driving it home harder, pressure building in his mind and roiling in his gut, but this is what he does; he smiles back and he thanks them and he jokes about freeze-dried vegetables, and he doesn't let them see how nervous he is.

"You ready for this?" he beams into his helmet, glancing back to smile at the Holts buckled into the seats beside him as command does the final checks before the countdown. Matt looks as nervous as Shiro feels, and even Sam, who has done this more than once, is overly vigorous with his affirmation. Command gives them the clear, and then the countdown begins, numbers sounding in his head as he prepares himself for ignition. He tries not to focus on the way his hands shake over the console.

He has been to space twice before, a supply run to the Space Station and a three-month camp on the moon, but it had never been anything like this, piloting his own ship to the outer edges of the solar system, nothing but him and the ship beneath his hands and months of space before him, and he wonders why he was ever scared of this, why he ever doubted himself.

"You knew you could not have this," Haggar crones in his ear, the black expanse of white stars rippling into grey tile and dark spots of blood on the floor. Her fingers are sharp around the back of his neck, voice solid and real in his mind. "You knew you were doomed from the start."

"No," he tries to say, but he is too tired, too far gone and her hold too thick in his skull. He needs to escape from here, needs to find Sam and Matt, needs to get them back home, but he can't yet, not while they have him like this. He needs to wait for his opportunity, needs to wait for the perfect chance, because he will only get the one.

* * *

"A Galra ship?" Hunk asks, staring at the translucent red hologram on the screen. "What's so special about this one?"

"We don't know," Allura explains, waving her hand and bringing up a larger schematic of it. It looks the same as every other battlecruiser, big and menacing and likely to blow them up if they get spotted. "The moment we picked it up on our scanners, the Black Lion stopped. It's since returned to the hangars. We're not sure why."

"So let me get this straight," Lance begins, frowning up at the diagram of the ship. "Shiro, while completely comatose in a cryopod chamber, somehow managed to pilot the Black Lion all the way out here through a super-psychic link, discovering a Galra battleship that's no different to all the others, and is now suddenly done with telling us what to do. Am I the only one who thinks that doesn't make a lick of sense?"

Hunk raises his hand, and Pidge reaches up to put it back down. "Maybe he's not doing it on purpose," she thinks aloud, stepping around to investigate the hologram. "Maybe it's an accident, and the Lion is just feeding off his dreams. Maybe running into this ship wasn't something it intended, and that's why it stopped."

"Or he's remembering something," Keith muses, and they all pause. He stiffens a little, not having intended to draw the conversation. "I mean, he didn't used to remember a lot of his time with the Galra. It could be a… a suppressed memory, or something."

"You think he knows something about this ship?" Allura asks, but she's doubtful, not entirely convinced of the sensibility of it.

"In any case," Coran cuts in, "We need to decide what to do about it, because we've got about three ticks before it spots us."

Nobody speaks for a moment. None of them are quite sure what to do, aren't used to making split decisions like this. "Follow it," Allura says finally, "But make sure to keep us out of range. We'll keep an eye on it until we know for sure if this is Shiro's doing."

"Understood," Coran replies, setting about organising the castle to do just that, while the others begin to wonder just how serious this waiting game is becoming.

* * *

He has always hated the arena, but now more than ever. His arm still feels heavy and stiff by his side, but they hand him the sword regardless, expecting from him now what they have always expected. Ever since that first fight, since he took down the reigning champion and was given the title to claim as his own, they have always expected this. The sword feels strange in the nerves of his new hand, numb and heavy and difficult to hold, and while he feels he should risk changing to his non-dominant arm, he needs to pick this up as quickly as possible.

The first fight goes okay. They take him back afterwards, scan his vitals and tweak his arm and remind him not to resist. The second goes a little bit better, a little easier with the practise from the last one. The third fight changes the way he does these battles forever; it is a stronger opponent than the last two, yet more of the Galra's strange beasts collected from around the galaxy and brought here for sick pleasure. This one is smaller than most, nimbler, more agile, but still far stronger than he is, its force rattling in his arms when he blocks its attacks and his legs threatening to buckle beneath the weight of it.

It manages to knock the sword from his hands, the worn blade skittering over the dirt and too far out of his reach, too far out of any chance for survival, but he can't die here, not after he has already been through so much and come out on top. His right arm buzzes with sensation, generating at the join and jittering down through his wrist, his fingers, clenched by his side as he watches his opponent move in, slowly now, gloating. He remembers Haggar's voice, something she said to him during the surgery that he has only just recalled. "This will benefit you in so many ways," she'd told him, her hand glowing over his arm in the dull view of his half-lidded eyes. "It will make you stronger. So fight with it."

His blood rings in his ears, dirt in his mouth and parching his throat, his opponent nearly upon him now. He can still feel the energy in his hand, coursing and pulling and urging him on; it tightens when he clenches his fingers, solidifies, glows with newfound power he does not fully understand.

He fights.

* * *

"This is interesting," Coran mutters, pulling Pidge's attention away from the device she's been picking away at for the last hour. He holds up his scanner when she steps up behind him for a look, gesturing to the sprawling Altean and vague diagrams on the screen. "I've been assessing the blood sample I took from Shiro before we put him in," he explains, bringing up what she recognises to be an image of some sort of cellular structure. "And I came across this."

She frowns, trying to figure out what he's getting at. She doesn't recognise what exactly it is, but that's not surprising given that they're millions of lightyears from Earth. "Which is… what, exactly?" she asks, nervous about the look in his eyes.

"The poison. It isn't poison at all." Pidge takes a moment to let that sink in, panic rising as she wonders what that means for Shiro, what it is if not poison that has done this to him. Coran catches the look in her eyes and explains before she panics entirely. "It's essentially the same in the way it's absorbed into the bloodstream, but whatever this is, it's doing something fundamentally different."

She's not sure what's worse; knowing that something is out there attacking and poisoning Paladins, or not knowing what exactly this thing does. "How do you mean? What _does_ it do?"

Coran shakes his head, tapping away at the scanner to try and find something, too fast for Pidge to keep up with. "It's not designed to kill him. It's… It's got a whiff of quintessence about it." Pidge has read enough of the archives to understand that quintessence, in this instance at least, is some seriously bad news. Whatever it's doing to Shiro, it's not going to be pretty. "There's a high chance that the Galra are behind this, though I'm not sure how. Zarkon's witch is probably the one that engineered this, trying to gain something by worming her way into Shiro's mind."

"So this Galra ship we're chasing, it might not be Shiro leading us there?"

"At this point, I doubt it. They're probably just trying to lure us in."

She tries not to focus on the disturbing thought of some kind of space-witch tracking down Paladins and getting into their heads. It was disturbing enough having other Paladins inside her head; she can only imagine what Shiro must be feeling. "So how do we calibrate around that?" she asks, trying to move the topic away from Galra mind games. "To know when he'll wake up?"

"We can't," Coran tells her, pausing in his work to give her a helpless sigh. "His body has likely already healed. It's up to him to combat the mental component now. There's nothing more we can do."

* * *

There is something he really admires about Arus. He hasn't been able to put his finger on what, exactly – whether it's the deeper hues the sun in this solar system gives the sky or the light of several moons or the way the lake's ripples reflect off the castle walls – but he admires it nonetheless, sitting on one of the northern piers and looking out over the water and the hills beyond. He thinks of a summer camp he took back on Earth, a long time ago now, sneaking up to the roof of the cabin to watch the sun set over the mountains behind them, staying for hours more to watch the stars once it was gone.

"You have a big heart," his father had told him once, sitting on the back porch with a beer and watching the stars with him. "You've always wanted more than the Earth can give you."

He wasn't sure what to say to that back then, and he still isn't now, watching the ripples of both moons reflected in the water. He tries to imagine what it would be like to go home, to go back to Earth and not have to worry about the Galra or Zarkon or defending the universe, but it's not home for him anymore; even if he could go back, the Garrison would keep him sealed, too scared of what they don't know to let him be free. He is better off here, now.

"You were better off with the Galra," Haggar says beside him, her voice oddly gentle in the light of the moons. "All this could have been at your fingertips. You could have explored the universe at your leisure."

"And let you ruin it behind me," he mutters back, turning to face her. Her face is shrouded as usual, her mouth a hard line beneath the shadow of her hood. For some reason, he isn't scared at the sight of her. "I'd prefer this to knowing I was helping you destroy the galaxy."

"Even if it means you will never find a place to call home?"

He hesitates, thinking of Earth, the Garrison, the castle he's sitting on and his friends inside, his Paladins, Coran and Allura. "Maybe," he sighs, "But I'm happy with what I've got."

He looks back up as thunder rolls in the distance, the wind picking up around them, and it is only now that he notices the violet glow around her hands. It almost reminds him of his own hand, the colour it glows when he fills it with power. "They will be destroyed eventually," she warns him, "And it will destroy you."

He watches the clouds move closer, thunder striking over the mountains and rumbling in his ears. Haggar is still beside him, unmoving as she brings the storm closer; he can feel the static in the air as she seethes, tingling in his skin, but she doesn't say anything more. Shiro rises to his feet, stepping back from the edge of the pier. "I'll take my chances," he says, then turns and walks back into the castle.

* * *

"Do you have any plarndox?"

"Go fish," Lance sighs, watching as Hunk grumbles and picks up another card from the deck, of which he still has no idea from where Hunk dredged it up. This is their third round of the day, and he's beginning to feel pretty bitter about staring at the same cards again and again; at first he'd been ecstatic about the find, something new and interesting to keep them occupied as they kept watch on Shiro's pod (Coran had figured he was due to wake up soon, but was still unable to pinpoint exactly when), but already it was quickly becoming an eyesore.

At this point he finally decides to call it quits, throwing his hand down on the floor between them, face up and with a grunt of disapproval. Hunk pauses and glances up at him, concern now lining his face. "Are you okay?" he asks slowly, resting his own hand face down in his lap.

"No," Lance bites back, throwing his hands up in frustrated gesture, "I'm not. I'm going stir crazy, Hunk. We're hurtling through space at who knows what speed in a futuristic alien castle-ship, and we have _nothing_ to do. We've been stuck in this castle for days following a Galra battlecruiser without knowing why and _waiting_ for something to happen, but it's taking so freaking long. I just want something to happen already."

Hunk had a feeling this would happen eventually, the long wait wearing down on even the most patient of them, let alone Lance. "You know what Coran said," he tries to placate anyway, leaning back where they're sitting on the floor at the bottom of the few steps to the pod. "It won't be too much longer. You can wait another day or so."

"It's already _been_ days," Lance whines back, but he knows he's working a losing argument, defeat sinking into his tone and slumping his shoulders. "I just want answers, man."

"I know," Hunk murmurs back, setting the cards on the floor, then they both start as the pod behind them lets out a heavy hiss, jumping to their feet as mist seeps out and the cover de-materialises. "Looks like you're about to get them," he says as they jog up the steps to the pod, reaching it just in time to catch Shiro as he slumps forward from within.

He's bleary as he opens his eyes, slow to wake as people often are from cryo; it takes him a moment, but eventually his eyes swim into focus, shifting between Lance and Hunk and their arms around him and the otherwise empty chamber room. "What happened?" he asks as they move him forward to sit on the steps, Hunk darting away to grab the blanket they had on standby for him.

"That depends," Lance replies, "What do you remember?"

He remembers his Lion. He remembers training with her down on the planet, remembers the soft dirt beneath his feet when he set down for a break. He remembers Arus, the Garrison, the harsh red sand of the arena, glaring lights above his head. "It's hard to say," he breathes, brow furrowing as he tries to sift through it all. "I think the last I remember was the training run on the last planet. After that it's… kind of a blur."

Lance and Hunk glance at each other, heavy and full of meaning he doesn't understand. "When you're feeling better," Hunk begins, "We need to get you to talk to Allura. There's a lot you need to know."

* * *

There is a long silence as Allura thinks it all over, standing at her control board with a pensive expression as the others stand around her in the heavy silence that followed her discussion with Shiro. She had asked him to tell her all he knew, threw a few pointed questions when she needed him to elaborate, and while there was not much to tell (Shiro's memories can still be garbled at the best of times, and he was already breaking the norm by dreaming in the chamber to start with), she seems to have a lot to think about.

"This certainly requires further study," she says finally, glancing up at them. "Coran, I want you to keep that blood sample on file, see what you can find out whenever you have a moment. As for our next course of action…" She stops here, her eyes meeting Shiro's, strong-set and straight-shouldered as he always is standing before her like this, but the fear of not knowing still sits wide in his eyes. "You definitely don't remember anything about a Galra ship?"

He remembers the prison ship, but they had only ever kept him on the one, transferring him only when they sent him down to the arena. "No," he tells her, "I have no idea why the Lion led you to this one."

She closes her eyes for a moment, nodding. "Alright. Coran, we're turning this ship around. I don't want to be this close to a battlecruiser any longer than necessary."

"You got it, princess," Coran replies, immediately setting about their change of course.

Allura dismisses them and begins to turn back to her control panel, but then she pauses, looking back to Shiro. "I'm glad you're alright," she says quietly, smiling to him.

He smiles back, watching as a map materialises in the air around her, calm blues and a gentle glow. "So am I," he tells her, and means it more than they know.


End file.
